The applicant herein was the inventor in the matter of Australian Patent No. 559279 (10254/83) in the name of Hydro Thermal Engineering Pty. Ltd. The cooling tower pack described and illustrated in that specification has proved to be particularly successful, and was based on the principle that the greater the ratio of interface area between water and air related to the volume of water in the pack, the greater the evaporation and hence the ability to cool the air and water. The pack described therein maintained water as a film over the surface of the pack elements as the water descended, and this has been proven to be an extremely efficient way to achieve a high degree of cooling.
The first object of the present invention is to provide improvements whereby the face-to-face contiguity of the cooling pack and eliminator pack elements is reduced so that there is a very small amount of crevice area, and in turn the possibility of algae growth, or legionella or other bacteria growth, is substantially reduced. A second object is to provide means whereby the size of the cooling pack for a given area of air/water interface, can be substantially less than with the arrangement previously invented by the inventor herein.
However difficulties of design occur when attempts are made to avoid face-to-face contact of bridge portions of the pack (as described in said specification No. 559279). If attempts are made to nest edges of one pack element against complementary surfaces of an adjacent pack element, the geometry is such that it becomes necessary to have different shapes for alternate elements, and this is uneconomical, both with regard to tooling and with regard to pack assembly. Furthermore, the reduction of surface-to-surface contact area is not as much as is regarded as desirable.